Bicton House

Bicton Park Botanical Gardens

Bicton Park Botanical Gardens is a Grade I registered historic landscape encompassing 25 hectares in East Devon, developed from 1800 onwards by John Rolle, 1st Baron Rolle, and Louisa Trefusis with guidance from John Claudius Loudon.

Situated in the sheltered Otter Valley, Bicton is celebrated for its peerless collection of nineteenth-century glasshouses and pioneering arboretum. The crowning architectural triumph is the Great Palm House, erected around 1825 by horticultural builder W. H. Darrow—a curvilinear, fish-scale dome constructed from over 18,000 panes of hand-cut glass, preceding Decimus Burton's Palm House at Kew and Joseph Paxton's conservatory at Chatsworth.

The formal landscape includes an early eighteenth-century Italianate canal garden with monumental stepped fountain basins and classical statues, an American Garden created for acid-loving shrubs, a rock garden, and a Shell Cottage lined with thousands of sea shells collected from Devon shores.

In 1830, Lady Louisa Rolle commenced the Bicton Arboretum, creating one of Britain's earliest and most comprehensive systematic collections of coniferous trees. The collection is famous for Britain's first major avenue of Chilean Monkey Puzzle trees (Araucaria araucana), planted in 1842, alongside towering North American redwoods and cedars.

Protected at Grade I under NHLE List Entry 1000338, Bicton represents one of the premier botanical monuments of southwest England, uniting cutting-edge Georgian glasshouse engineering with world-class plant conservation.

Written by Le Roi du Jardin. It sets out what is documented, not what is worth seeing.